AshLael
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User ID: 2498
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
9mo ago
Trump has been indicted (again), this time in Georgia, under RICO charges. The charges against him and a large number of co-conspirators relate to efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Full indictment here.
We've seen a range of charges laid against Trump in varying jurisdictions, and I think it's fair to say the cases have varying strength. These new charges seem to me to be on the strong end of the spectrum.
Helpfully, the indictment is painfully clear at every point as to what particular acts constitute which particular crimes or elements of crimes. This makes it a lot easier to assess for an uneducated layman like me. On at least some of the charges, it would appear that he's deeply screwed. E.g. "Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer" seems to be open and shut, and carries a minimum 1 year sentence. He also has no capacity to pardon himself if he is elected President, as these are not federal charges.
As far as I can tell Trump's only hope to escape conviction here is jury nullification.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
6mo ago
Following on from the defeat of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum (seriously can we just include Torres Strait Islanders in the definition of "Aboriginal"? The whole phrase is too many words) Aboriginal leaders declared a week of silence to mourn the result.
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the silence is now over. The leaders of the Yes campaign have published an open letter to the Parliament, and it is salty. So salty that reportedly some people refused to sign on to it - and perhaps that is why it appears without any names attached.
It opens by describing Australia's decision to vote no as "appalling and mean-spirited". It asserts that "It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around." It says that "the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act". So on and so forth.
In short, it is very much filled with the sort of resentment and hostility that turns people off, hard. Even on the normally far left /r/australia subreddit, posters are tearing strips off it.
This is of course a terrible time for the Yes campaigners to be acting in this way. With the failure of the Voice, indigenous policy is in a state of flux. The government is licking its wounds and weighing how to respond. These activists could not have made a better argument for why they should be sidelined in those deliberations.
Trump ordered to pay $355 million in penalties in New York Fraud case. He's also banned from operating any business in New York for three years, the Trump Organization is banned from borrowing money from any financial institution registered in New York for three years, and Eric and Don Jr each get their own $4 million dollar fines, and the former CFO Alan Wiesselberg owes a million. However the court also reverses its earlier ruling to cancel defendant's business certificates (aka the "corporate death penalty"). Instead an Independent Monitor will continue at the Trump Organisation for three years to ensure that it meets its financial reporting obligations.
All the penalties come with interest, so the defendants collectively owe around $450 million, not counting the $80+ million owed to E Jean Carroll. Even for Trump, that's serious money. Trump has of course said he will appeal, but to do so he will need to put up the full amount in bond first, and it's not clear he has the liquidity to do that - and as mentioned above he's now limited in his ability to borrow. And even if he manages to get the cash together, it doesn't seem to me that his prospects on appeal are at all good. Higher courts typically defer to the trial court's fact-finding, and Judge Engoron is not kind in his assessment of the credibility of Trump and his witnesses.
January 6th agitator Ray Epps has pled guilty to one charge of disorderly conduct. The NYT story contains this sentence:
The guilty plea entered by Mr. Epps showed that he was being held accountable for his crimes and undercut the narrative that he was being protected by the federal government.
I'm not so sure about that. For those who haven't paid attention (a group that included myself until a discussion here a while back), Epps is on video repeatedly urging other members of the crowd to go into the Capitol. Many people have speculated that he was in fact some form of federal agent or informant. The fact that this is the legal outcome for him heightens, rather than lessens, my personal suspicion that he was working for the feds.
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It is a very minor charge. Now granted, Epps did not enter the Capitol himself - but his open agitation of the attack nonetheless seems to me like it should constitute a significantly more serious offence, such as incitement to riot.
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Speaking of which, it's very odd that he did not go into the Capitol himself, given that he loudly and repeatedly urged others to.
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The fact that this minor charge plea deal has taken so long is very eyebrow raising as well. We typically saw the less serious cases dealt with quite quickly, while the big trials with serious jail time on the line took much longer - and even they got dealt with more quickly than Epps!
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It's also extremely curious to me that they arranged a plea deal with Epps before he was ever charged with anything. That's not the normal way things go, as far as I'm aware - usually they throw everything they can at you, and then agree to drop some charges in exchange for guilty pleas for the others.
Now, it may be that there are matters of fact or law that I'm not aware of that makes all of this very normal and reasonable, and if so I would be delighted to be informed of them. But as it stands I am at a loss to explain how this guy is getting this treatment if he is not some kind of undercover operative.
EDIT: Thanks to @huadpe and @Gillitrut who have convinced me that the elements of more serious charges against Epps could probably not be satisfied.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
9mo ago
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
9mo ago
My completely amateur and unqualified opinion after reading the indictment - I dunno. It's not a nothingburger, but it feels way less solid than the documents charges. It's not exactly clear which actions are supposed to constitute which elements of which offense. Like, I feel like you could probably go through and make some argument that this conversation counts as conspiracy and that action counts as obstruction and whatever, but it's kind of been left as an exercise for the reader.
Count two probably gets there. It seems clear that Trump was actively involved in discussing and planning efforts to obstruct the certification of the election. Probably it turns on whether or not the DoJ can prove that he did so "corruptly", whatever that means in this context, but they probably can. I'm less confident of the other charges.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
9mo ago
Also included in your quote is the request made to David Ralston, speaker of the house, asking him to convene a special session of the house for the purpose of appointing fake electors.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
Er, Biden has a very strong legal leg to stand on. It's not an invasion, it's illegal immigration. The current situation is different in scale to what has happened continuously for many decades but not conceptually. I understand the desire to rhetorically brand the situation an "invasion", but it's not actually what it is. October 7th is what an invasion looks like.
The federal government does in fact have the legal authority to administer immigration law. That the current one is doing so very badly does not change this.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
9mo ago
Victims of the MSM and the American propaganda system loved to go around initially and proclaim, “Putin is losing the war! Their military is overreaching! They’ve overspent themselves!,” but it never dawned on them for even a moment that Putin was never trying to go full Mike Tyson on Ukraine.
It's clearly absurd to think that the current situation is one that Putin wanted. Whatever he was trying to achieve, it wasn't this.
I don't think his desire was to annihilate Ukraine, to be clear. I don't even think his initial goal was to annex Ukraine. I think his desire was to kill Zelensky and install Yanukovych as a friendly leader. Obviously things didn't work out the way he wanted and we're now on plan D or something.
Let's be blunt. The overwhelming majority of criticism of Israel is antisemitism. Sure, in theory you can criticize Israeli policy while holding no ill will towards Jews, just as you can don a swastika without being a nazi. There's probably even a few people doing that! But it's not the bulk of what we're seeing.
I could understand someone being horrified by both Hamas' genocidal attack and Israel's forceful response. But that doesn't describe the people flying Palestinian flags and donning keffiyehs. That does not describe the people chanting "long live the intifada" or "victory to the freedom fighters" or "from the river to the sea" or "gas the Jews". They aren't upset that the war is happening, they are upset that Israel is winning.
These people fundamentally see Hamas' attack as legitimate and Israel's response as illegitimate, because they see Israel itself as illegitimate, and they see Israel as illegitimate because it's a Jewish country. It's as clear and simple as that.
No one protests the British creation of Jordan just a few years before Israel. Why not? Because Jordan is full of Arabs. The conflict is not about lines on a map, it is about Jews.
And let's be clear about what "Zionism" is. It's the belief that Israel should continue to exist. Anyone who describes themselves as "anti-Zionist" is demanding an end to the Jewish state, from which will inevitably follow an end to the Jewish population in the middle east. If you are not for Zionism, you are for genocide.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
5mo ago
Yes, the federal Jan 6 case scheduled to start on March 4 is the one I'm talking about. I think he's completely screwed in the Georgia case and the documents case too, but they're more logistically complicated and are unlikely to go to trial before the election.
I think he went way, way beyond "disputing" the election. He actively tried to stay in power despite losing the vote and despite the courts rejecting his false claims of fraud. He had no legal avenues remaining to stay in power, and he tried to use illegal ones.
Jan 6 was effectively a failed coup. It was an egregious attack on American democracy. Heinous crimes like that should not be tolerated simply because they are committed by political opponents.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
9mo ago
I can't wait for Republicans in 2025 trying to figure out how they could have possibly lost with their candidate trying to campaign from a prison cell.
Probably they'll decide it was fraud again.
AshLael
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4mo ago
Adam Unikowsky has a very good article going through all the potential outcomes from the all-but-inevitable SCOTUS case reviewing this decision and helpfully assigning a subjective probability to each one. The numbers aren't important, but it's a useful exercise to consider the various options the justices will face and the consequences that will flow from whatever judgement is reached.
I think there will be less appetite than he suggests for a procedural dodge that doesn't resolve the core issues. There is a clear and compelling need right now for clarity that only the Supreme Court can provide, and I think a clear majority (maybe excepting Roberts) will accept that responsibility - and besides, all of the various available dodges are pretty ugly. Accordingly I put the chances of both a clear reversal and a clear affirmation higher than does.
I agree with him that the single most likely outcome is probably a reversal on the basis that Trump's behaviour did not constitute engaging in an insurrection. But I also think it's very possible that many of the Republican justices will be willing to sign on to the Baude/Paulson analysis in full. There's obviously instinctive resistance to the idea of going against public opinion, but logically any eligibility criteria is meant to be applied in the face of popular will - if they were not, then normal democratic processes would be enough.
The sky won't fall if Trump is found ineligible. We threw fifteen(!) politicians out of parliament because they were constitutionally ineligible a few years ago and while it caused a bit of drama, the world kept turning. Retaliatory actions may be attempted but they will need to get through the courts too, and if they do so successfully, they will be justified.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
5mo ago
How is food waste an environmental issue? It's all biodegradable organics.
I spent a while in the last thread talking about immigration and Australian national identity, and it sort of only really just clicked for me how much the formation of that identity was bound up with the demise of the British Empire itself.
It's really obvious when you look at early Australian politics and writing how core the connection with Britain was. You could have a White Australia Policy because the answer to the question "who are we" was "British". Chinese aren't British, so they can't be Australian. But as time goes on that connection becomes weaker and more contested. For example this speech from PM Billy Hughes during World War 1:
At this election the people have to decide by whom they will be governed—under what banner they will stand, what policy they desire. The two parties seeking the suffrages of the people are as far asunder as night from day on matters vital to the welfare of the country. Their ideals are distinct—their outlook, their objective. The party that I have the honour to lead stands openly and freely for the Empire. Its members are proud to be citizens of the greatest confederation of free men and women that the world has ever seen. They recognise their great obligation to Britain; they recognise that they owe all their liberties, their free institution of government, their peaceful and happy occupation of this great island continent to the protection that Britain has given us ever since the first British colony was established here. They recognise that they cannot be true citizens of Australia and at the same time be hostile to or indifferent to the fate of Britain.
Sir, we believe in the British Empire because it stands for liberty; because it has given us all that we have; because it has protected us all our lives; because it now protects us; because we know that without its protection in this war we should long ago have become a German colony; that our lot would have been that of Belgium. We are for the Empire because the Empire is at once our sword and our shield. It is the greatest guarantee of the world’s peace, of true civilisation. We are for the Empire because we are true to Australia, to liberty, to ourselves. And because of this, we do not now ask whether a man is Labour or Liberal, but only whether he is an Australian, prepared to put Australia first and sweep all sectional interests aside. This is where we stand. What of our opponents? Sir, I shall not insult the intelligence of the electors by dwelling upon that which is obvious to all who are not wilfully blind. It is, I say, unfortunately only too true that many of those who are opposed to us do not share these views. Some are violently hostile to Britain, sneering at the Empire and all that it stands for; some, their vision clouded by gross misrepresentation and lies, think it possible to be loyal to Australia, yet indifferent if not hostile to the fate of the Empire.
At this stage Australia is a young nation, having federated less than 20 years prior. In most people's memory are the times of being colonies rather than a country. Hughes is giving a full throated defence of the British Empire, and explicitly rejecting the idea of a unique Australian identity distinct from the Empire. And he goes on to win the election convincingly. But it's clear that he's speaking in a context where these ideas and values are no longer universal, where some people are starting to think that Australia should be its own thing.
It would not be until after WW2 that Britain really began divesting itself of its colonial holdings - but these things happen slowly and you can see the increasing loss of belief in the Empire reflected in statements like Hughes'. I'm not sure whether it was that the Empire declined and "Australianism" rose to fill the void, or that "Australianism" naturally grew and outcompeted "Britishness". But regardless of which force was the driving cause, it's axiomatic that you can only have one highest loyalty.
So as we gain our own self conception as a country and as "Australian" ceases to mean "British" the rationale for the White Australia Policy fades away as well. It isn't overturned in one dramatic act as an explicit rejection of racism, but rather falls apart piecemeal bit by bit as the rules get adjusted incrementally. After WW2 there is a movement to grow Australia's population to make it better able to stand up for itself in times of war - "populate or perish" is the mantra, and the doors get opened to non-British europeans in order to make that happen. Harold Holt allows Australian soldiers to bring back Japanese "war brides". Asians are allowed to come to study. In 1958, a pathway is created for "distinguished and highly qualified" Asians. During the Vietnam war, South Vietnamese refugees escaping the Viet Cong are warmly welcomed as our allies, with my grandparents among many others taking a Vietnamese family into their home.
Most of this happens under conservative governments. There's some resistance on racist grounds to the crumbling of the White Australia Policy - particularly from Arthur Calwell, the long time opposition Labor leader. Calwell's vision of Australia was one of a "white" nation rather than a "British" nation:
I am proud of my white skin, just as a Chinese is proud of his yellow skin, a Japanese of his brown skin, and the Indians of their various hues from black to coffee-coloured. Anybody who is not proud of his race is not a man at all. And any man who tries to stigmatise the Australian community as racist because they want to preserve this country for the white race is doing our nation great harm... I reject, in conscience, the idea that Australia should or ever can become a multi-racial society and survive.
Calwell of course was Immigration Minister in the Chifley government and was the one who initiated the influx of non-British immigrants while at the same time degrading Australia's links to the British Empire.
But "whiteness" has poor appeal as an organising principle. Once you abandon the idea of being specifically British, it becomes hard to justify why the Germans and Italians (who we fought against) are more kin to us than the South Vietnamese (who we fought alongside). So Calwell's vision never comes to pass - Australia never meaningfully exists as a "white" country that isn't also British, and once we cease to see ourselves as a part of the Empire we also start welcoming Asians and other non-Europeans into our conception of what Australia is.
And it works. Back when I was younger there were fierce debates over "multiculturalism" as opposed to "assimilation". It was an intra-white culture war that has gone away almost entirely these days, as the immigrants we used to argue about have grown in number and taken their own role in shaping the course of our society. It turns out they mostly don't want to be stuck in racial ghettos and seen as seperate from the majority. The multiculturalists have found themselves with nothing to defend and the assimilationists have found themselves with nothing to attack.
(as an aside, one of the things I really like about most non-Anglo Australians is their casual dismissal of the woke mind virus that finds purchase among the minds of the Anglo left. There are few things more eye-rolling than a company's Anglo leadership making their mostly foreign-born workforce sit through cultural sensitivity training. Likewise, we had a minor family drama at our last Christmas get together when one of my aunts - a white sociologist - decided to give another of my aunts - a working class Croatian - a lecture about how as "a person from the former Yugoslavia" she didn't really understand how bad racism is.)
I love my country and what it is. It's absurd to me to think of an Englishman as being more "my people" than the Macedonian and Lebanese and Aboriginal and Sudanese players playing our national sport. It's absurd to me to think of the Indonesian and Chinese families at my kids school who willingly sacrificed birthday parties and family events to fight covid in our community as less "my people" than the white Americans who called our country a dictatorship for it. We're united by bushfires that turn the sky red and floods the size of seas. We are bound by so much more than blood.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
6mo ago
I vote no because Epstein getting to indulge his sick desire is inherently bad. Whether or not the girl is better off or not from the exchange is immaterial.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
8mo ago
The pro move for Democrats would be to use this to replace Biden with someone with a pulse.
30 years ago Bill Clinton was POTUS, John Major was PM of the UK, Kim Campbell was PM of Canada, Paul Keating was PM of Australia... these people are now half-forgotten relics of yesteryear, and all of them are younger than Joe Biden.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
5mo ago
I don't really see the problem here. Like, why is the energy input/output ratio the relevant metric? Obviously modern agriculture is going to involve more energy usage since we now have tractors and stuff and we didn't use to. But that's also why we are now able to feed 8 billion people. Energy is there to be used - and what's a better use for it than feeding the world?
I don't believe there is another viable option to "industrial agriculture" when it comes to producing the amount of food we need. And if your problem is that it uses natural biofuels, I don't agree, but that's an argument for getting the required energy from other sources rather than for scrapping all the combine harvesters.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
9mo ago
Libraries are obsolete. Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.
Naturally institutions try to justify themselves and find reasons for their own continued existence. The proper response is to dismiss such efforts.
I changed my mind on Epps during our last discussion. I'm not particularly invested in the question of whether some participants in Jan 6 were feds or not, and I was totally willing to believe Epps was. However, I think a careful examination of the relevant law makes it much less likely that his light punishment is indicative of him being treated with kid gloves.
The most notable things Epps did was loudly advocate for entering the capital. But it's difficult to actually make a case based on this. First amendment jurisprudence makes it really really hard to prove incitement, and conspiracy charges require agreement - and it's notable that he gets shouted down with accusations of being a fed when he starts yelling about going into the capitol. If he's a conspirator, who are his co-conspirators? There's a video of him whispering to another guy shortly before a barrier is breached but both Epps' and the other guy's accounts of what he said aren't incriminating.
In short, I got convinced by the fact that the charges that I thought he should be up for are just a really hard lift - as also evidenced by the fact that no one else, even Trump himself, has been charged for incitement of a riot (and as an aside, while the Colorado court found Trump to have incited Jan 6 by the standard of "clear and compelling evidence", an implication of that ruling is that he was not guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt"). And the feds hate losing cases, so they tend to drop charges that aren't rock solid.
Take out any way of charging him for things he said, and it's hard to nail him on anything other than weak "disorderly conduct" type charges. Someone who entered the Capitol later during the event and walked around a bit before leaving while damaging nothing feels morally much less culpable than Epps, but they actually have committed an action that is easier to prosecute more harshly. The law doesn't match our intuitions perfectly, some people get a raw deal and some get lucky. Such is life.
The main remaining thing that I find strange about the Epps case is that he went on repeatedly about entering the Capitol, but then didn't actually do so himself. A lot of people clearly shared his belief that they should enter the Capitol, and acted on it, but he didn't. Why? Change of heart? Just a coward? Could be, I guess. It's weird, but not so weird that him being some sort of plant is the only plausible explanation.
At the end of the day though, regardless of whether the motte of "some government officials were involved in Jan 6" is true or not, the bailey of "Jan 6 was orchestrated by the feds to make Trump and his supporters look bad" is obviously false. Maybe some Capitol police shared the goals of the rioters and deliberately let them in. Maybe some crook who was being used as an informant went and committed more crimes. But the driving force behind Jan 6 was obviously Trump and his supporters, and there is no clearer evidence of this than the fact that they continue to defend and justify Jan 6. If it was all a ploy to discredit Trump, why is he going around demanding Biden release the "J6 hostages"? Why is he promising to issue pardons? It can't simultaneously be true that it was a "fedsurrection" and that it was just a "peaceful and patriotic protest" whose participants are being unjustly prosecuted.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
7mo ago
The entire point of this prosecution is to hamper Trump's efforts to campaign
I'm pretty sure the point of this prosecution is to put Trump in prison.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
9mo ago
I think if you look at it more through a geopolitical and International Relations (IR) lens, ask yourself what Putin should’ve done if you were in his situation. I can’t think of a good decision to make either, but his hands were tied.
I don't believe for a second that this was an inevitable war forced on a reluctant Putin. He had choices at every point - the most important of course being the choice to invade Ukraine, which he could have simply not done. Now, he may have decided that war was the best path forward for his interests - and maybe that was even a rational decision based on the information he had at the time. He certainly wouldn't have been alone in thinking that Ukraine would not be able to put up much of a fight. But I highly suspect that if he had known the path that the future would take, he would have chosen differently.
His hands were not tied. He made a decision - and it was the wrong decision.
Did you know that Yanukovych was the democratically elected President of Ukraine before the western backed Maidan coup happened?
Yes. I'm also extremely confident he no longer has popular support in Ukraine.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
5mo ago
This reminds me of another person who confidently prognosticated, back in the day, that Trump would be in jail within a matter of weeks. It didn't happen.
I also remember that person. And you may recall that at that time I did not make those sorts of silly predictions. Judge me on my own words rather than Impassionata's, if you don't mind.
The situation is different now. We don't merely have an investigation. We have 91 felony charges. We have a trial date. We have clear and compelling evidence that he did exactly what he's alleged to have done. He's been repeatedly sanctioned for breaching bail conditions. We've already seen courts in civil cases find that he committed sexual assault, fraud, and insurrection. He's defending himself with the nonsense argument that he is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for any crime he committed as President. SCOTUS is not stalling for him. Four of his co-conspirators have already plead guilty. The walls actually are closing in.
To top it off, there's no one on Trump's side who seems to be able to offer a credible legal argument for his innocence. What we get, both from pro-Trump commentators and from Trump's own legal team, are accusations of political bias and election interference. That stuff can rile up the base but it doesn't win trials.
Even today, the truth still matters sometimes. Trump was never going to be jailed on the timeframes Impassionata suggested even if he was obviously guilty, but the reason why he wasn't jailed at all is because Trump didn't actually collude with Russia. However Trump did actually try to overturn the 2020 election. He did it openly, he did it shamelessly, and you saw it with your own two eyes.
Yes, there's a lot of noise and rancour. But underneath it there is also reality. And the reality is about as bleak for Trump as it is for George Santos and Bob Menendez.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
7mo ago
It's really weird to me how many people (including Trump himself) can apparently only see these cases through the lens of their political implications.
The plan isn't to smear or discredit Trump and therefore make him unpopular. It's to lock him up for the rest of his life.
I saw the following exchange between Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, and it made me angry. So instead of getting over it and going and doing normal things like a well adjusted adult, I decided to complain about it on the internet.
First of all, I'm at least glad to see that reality is starting to set in. Trump is going to get his nonsense "absolute immunity" claim promptly rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court. He's going to go on trial on March 4, he's going to get convicted, and he's going to go to prison. This has all been obvious for some time, and people do need to come to grips with it instead of telling themselves "it can't happen, so it won't".
But there is a stark mismatch here between the acceptance on one hand that the jury will convict Trump but the insistence on the other hand that "the charges aren't real". DC is an overwhelmingly democratic voting jurisdiction, but you would need to be cynical indeed to think there is no chance that even one Democrat juror would refuse to imprison a political opponent on obviously baseless charges. But of course, the charges are not nearly so baseless as Carlson suggests.
No, the reason that Kelly and Carlson know that Trump is going down is not because they think there is not one honest soul to be found in DC. They can have confidence Trump will lose this case because both his conduct and the law have little mystery about them. On the facts, there's little if any dispute about the actions that Trump took. On the law we have seen similar charges applied to many January 6 defendants, and it has not gone well for them. If Trump is to get similar treatment for similar conduct, he must be convicted.
Carlson and Kelly know that he's guilty and yet they pretend otherwise. Carlson rants about how outrageous it is to render people's votes meaningless, and yet when Trump is charged for conspiring to do exactly that he flatly states it's "not even a real crime". I emphasize that his contention here isn't even that Trump didn't do the awful thing he's accused of - he's saying that the things he's accused of aren't awful. This lays bare how empty and fake Carlson's feigned defence of democracy is. You can believe that it's outrageous to deprive people of their democratic rights or you can believe that conspiring to deprive people of their democratic rights isn't a "real crime", but it's incoherent to claim both.
But worst of all is the "warning" of violence. Carlson tells us that the man who incited a riot must not be punished or else we'll get more riots. This is the logic of terrorism. Give us what we want or there will be blood. Sure, he phrases it as a prediction rather than a threat and says he detests violence... but he knows full well that many of the people who might actually commit it could well be listening to him, and he knows he is fanning the flames of their resentment and putting the thought of violence in their heads. This would be irresponsible even if Carlson were sincere, but the fact that he's obviously being cynical makes it worse. This is a man who passionately hates Trump and couldn't wait for him to get kicked out of the White House - and yet here he is inventing excuses for him, pre-emptively trying to discredit the verdict he knows is coming, sanewashing Trump's "rigged election" claims, stoking anger, and telling people that violence is the inevitable response if Trump gets locked up. All, one presumes, so he can maintain his position in the GOP media ecosystem. What a worm.
Smith and Chuktan will obviously not allow themselves to be swayed by threats of violence, so we will unfortunately get to see if the dark talk turns into action. I for one hope Trump's most volatile supporters will at least recognize the truth that Carlson acknowledges - it will go extremely badly for anyone who takes it upon themselves to shed blood.
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